The present invention, relates to a feeding apparatus including a feeding roller picking up a stacked first medium and feeding the picked-up first medium downstream, a medium guiding section guiding the fed first medium to a pair of rollers, and the pair of rollers transporting the guided first medium to a recording section, a recording apparatus and a liquid ejecting apparatus which have the feeding apparatus.
Here, the liquid ejecting apparatus is not limited to recording apparatuses such as an ink jet recording apparatus, a copy machine, and a facsimile which perform recording on a recording material by ejecting ink to the recording material such as a recording paper from a recording head as a liquid ejecting head. The liquid ejecting apparatus includes a kind of apparatus for attaching the liquid to an ejection material corresponding to the recording material by ejecting the liquid utilised in place of ink for its equivalent usage to the ejection material from the liquid ejecting head corresponding to the recording head. As the liquid ejecting head, besides the above-mentioned recording head, there are a color material ejecting head used for manufacturing a color filter such as a liquid crystal display, an electrode material (conductive paste) ejecting head used for manufacturing an electrode such as an organic EL display or a field emission display (FED), a bioorganic material ejecting head used for manufacturing a biochip, a sample ejecting head as a minute pipette, etc.
As described in Japanese Patent Publication No. 11-139587A, a known feeding apparatus includes a hopper in which sheets are stacked and a feeding roller which picks up a top-most sheet from the stacked sheets and feeds the picked-up sheet downstream. The feeding roller is disposed at a position deviated from the center in a main scanning direction which is a widthwise direction of the sheet. Accordingly, even when sheets of different sizes are fed, sheets of all sides are configured to be fed by using a side edge restricting section disposed close to a position where the feeding roller is deviated as a reference (that is, by using a 1-column side as a reference), whereby it is possible to cope with the sheets of all sizes with one feeding roller.
However, when a sheet having a comparatively large width is fed, a force of the feeding roller pressing the sheet is not imposed to a side opposed to the side where the feeding roller is deviated from the center in the main scanning direction. For this reason, on the opposed side, the sheet is lifted in feeding, whereby there is a possibility that a skew will occur. Hereinafter, a cause of occurrence of the skew by the lifting will be described with reference to FIGS. 8(A) and 8(B).
FIGS. 8(A) and 8(B) are side sectional views frustrating a transport path of the known feeding apparatus. Of them, FIG. 8(A) illustrates a configuration in which an auxiliary feeding roller is not disposed. Meanwhile, FIG. 8(B) illustrates a configuration in which the auxiliary feeding roller is disposed.
As shown in FIG. 8(A), a known feeding apparatus 500 includes a feeding roller 501 having a D shape as viewed from a side surface deviated to the 1-column side in the main scanning direction, a retard roller 506 serving as separation means disposed to be in outer contact with the feeding roller 501, a pair of transporting rollers 503 transporting the sheet to a recording section (not shown) disposed downstream, and a guide section 505 which is disposed in a base section 504 and which guides the sheet fed between the feeding roller 501 and the pair of transporting rollers 503. When the sheet is fed to the pair of rollers 503, a 1-column side 508 of the sheet adjacent to the feeding roller 501 in the main scanning direction is pinched between the feeding roller 501 and the retard roller 506 in a frontage opening section 507 constituted by a holder section 502 and the base section 504, whereby the position thereof is restricted.
Meanwhile, an 80-column side 509 of the sheet opposed to the 1-column side is far from the feeding roller 501 and a positional restriction performed by the pinching is not imposed to the 80-column side 509 of the sheet, whereby there is a possibility that lifting will occur. When the lifting occurs as described above, there is a difference between the 1-column side 508 of the sheet and the 80-column side 509 of the sheet on a sheet path (track) ranging from the frontage opening section 507 to the pair of transporting rollers 503. Specifically, since the sheet path (track) on the 80-column side 508 of the sheet takes a short cut by a lifting distance, the sheet path (track) on the 80-column side 509 of the sheet where the lifting occurs is shorter than the sheet path (track) on the 1-column side 508. Here, reference numeral 511 represents is an origin upstream of the sheet path (track) of the 1-column side of the sheet and the sheet path (track) of the 80-column side of the sheet.
Accordingly, the sheet path on the 80-column side of the sheet is shortened by taking the shortcut and thus, the 80-column side of the sheet is precedently fed to the pair of rollers 503, whereby the skew occurs.
As shown in FIG. 8(B), in the known feeding apparatus 500, an auxiliary feeding roller 510 having the same shape as the feeding roller 501 is disposed on a shaft the same as a driving shaft of the feeding roller 501 and on the 80-column side opposed to the 1-column side. Accordingly, even when the sheet having the comparatively large width is fed, the 80-column side 509 of the sheet is pressed, thereby suppressing the 80-column side 509 of the sheet from lifting in the frontage opening section 507. As a result, the feeding roller 500 is configured to suppress the skew from occurring due to the lifting.
However, when the auxiliary feeding roller 510 is disposed on the 80-column side, a feeding roller shaft-(not shown) needs to extend to the 80-column side. Accordingly, there is a possibility that accuracies of components will be difficult to control. There is a possibility that the long feeding roller shaft will result in an increase in cost.